Posts on Cloud,DevOps, Citrix,VMware and others. Also tracking my Continuous learning from Wintel to open source and development.
Words and views are my own and do not reflect on my companies views.
Disclaimer: some of the links on this site are affiliate links, if you click on them and make a purchase, I make a commission.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

The Total Economic Impact of Red Hat Ansible Tower

The Total Economic Impact of Red Hat Ansible Tower is a Red Hat commissioned Forrester Consulting study published in June 2018. This study demonstrates the cost savings and business benefits enabled by Ansible. Let's dive into the what Ansible Tower enables, the efficiencies gained, the acceleration of revenue recognition, and other tangible benefits.

Faster Revenue Recognition

Revenue recognition is a critical aspect of business operations. Quickening the pace of revenue recognition is something every organization has their eye on. Forrester's TEI of Ansible Tower observed a company cutting delivery lead times by 66%. Imagine the pace of feature deployment an organization experiences when cutting lead times from days to hours!

System reconfiguration times fell as well. Automating changes due to new bugs or policy changes across systems helps mitigate the costly impact of reconfiguration. This company found that the total time savings of being able to reconfigure a fleet of systems through Ansible automation reduced staff hours by 94% for this type of work.

The TEI also measured the security and compliance gains of Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower reduced staff hours spent patching systems by 80%. This also meant that patching systems could occur more often. This helped reduce the number of known vulnerabilities in customer environments at any given moment.

Improving Security and Compliance

Ansible Tower also helps enable the adoption and automation of CIS Benchmarks across systems. CIS Benchmarks are, "guidelines for various technology groups to safeguard systems against today's evolving cyber threats." This enabled the customer interviewed for the study to navigate an ever changing security landscape. Using trusted automation workflows that "maintain the latest and greatest standards" created a more secure environment.

Additionally, the study found Ansible Tower reduced response times to security incidents by 94%. When you consider something as impactful as Heartbleed or WannaCry, being able to rapidly patch systems could prevent a catastrophic impact to business continuity. Ansible Tower helped enable GDPR compliance as well. The laborious tasks for patching systems became significantly easier thanks to Ansible Tower. "The organization moved to a monthly patching cycle, increasing the frequency of updates." The best part, for the company surveyed, Red Hat Ansible Tower enabled these security and compliance gains with no extra staff.

Empower Staff to Do More

One of the key benefits observed in the TEI, was better staff enablement. Not only were existing staff accomplishing more tasks in less time but, junior staff could be empowered to take on higher level tasks. Complex tasks could be delegated to greener team members. Ansible Tower eliminated dull, boring, and repetitive tasks through automation.

Red Hat Ansible Tower's ease of use shined in this study. The lead infrastructure architect said, "We had the ability for Tower to be used within our environment in under a week with the tools provided out of the box." Ansible Tower democratizes the flexibility and power of Ansible. Infrastructure staff built functionality to enable end users to act safely in their own environments. End users of Ansible Tower functionality required only one hour of training to be qualified and productive.

Hiring is an increasingly difficult task for IT organizations. The time it takes to find and recruit talent, onboard, and train new hires comes at a cost. The gains made by implementing Ansible Tower reduced the urgency of onboarding more staff for this company. Forrester's TEI indicated Red Hat's customer, "saved 48,000 hours of staff time by automating the process of bringing servers online, stress testing resources and deleting nodes." When assuming a typical, salaried US employee's work hours to be 2,000 hours per year, implementing Ansible Tower has a potential staff hours savings of eight full time employees per year.

No Expensive Hardware Needed

According to the TEI, "Rather than purchase name-brand appliances for its data centers, the interviewed organization created an Ansible Playbook and ran the automated functionality using generic Linux systems Rather than purchase name-brand appliances for cloud configuration, backups, etc. in its data centers, the customer stood up Ansible Tower and ran the automated functionality using generic Linux systems." The organization avoided purchasing 10 name brand infrastructure appliances, representing a three-year present value of $389,707."

In conclusion, we believe that Red Hat Ansible Tower can enable organizations to do what they've done successfully for years at scale. Ansible Tower helps organizations accelerate revenue recognition. Automation with Ansible can improve the safety and surety of IT infrastructure by automating patching and compliance tasks. Ansible can free up staff time and raise the capabilities of all staff to take part in a greater velocity of improvements. What do you want to Ansible today?